Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :. Injustice News Twitter Feed :.Mark Bennett | April 26, 2008
New York criminal-defense lawyer Scott Greenfield asks of the criminal justice system, “is it too broken?“ These are a few of the questions he asks: Are jurors capable of discerning truth from deception, or is this just a vanity of our support for trial by jury? . . . . Is there a fundamental flaw [...]
Mark Bennett | April 4, 2008
Are you passionate about the law? Do you think the law is a beautiful thing? Do you adore it? Not I. The law is a street fight. It’s trench warfare. There’s nothing beautiful about it. It’s inelegant, messy and dangerous. Sometimes the right side loses. Often everyone loses. Our justice system’s the worst possible — [...]
Mark Bennett | February 13, 2008
Scott Greenfield’s Simple Justice blog just celebrated its one-year anniversary. Anne Reed’s Deliberations celebrated its anniversary on Saturday. I had a blog back in 2004-2005, when the blawgosphere was young. I posted 17 times between August 2004 and June 2005. Then I quit, figuring that this “blogging” thing would never catch on. When I resumed [...]
Mark Bennett | January 31, 2008
Mensa is an organization for people with IQs above the 98th percentile. That translates to IQs above 132 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test (wikipedia). (It is, to borrow from John Bender, sorta social — demented and sad, but social.) Lawyer is a typical occupation for people with an IQ in the 130s. According to the [...]
Mark Bennett | September 7, 2007
I take an appointed criminal case in federal court from time to time. I don’t need the cases (my time is worth much more than the $94-an-hour that the federal courts pay under the CJA), but I see indigent defense as a public service. As a consequence, I don’t have any problem with my appointed [...]
Mark Bennett | June 26, 2007
Today Avvo has a post today entitled Lost. Avvo categorizes the post as “How to Choose a Lawyer,” but it’s really about Avvo’s research into people’s experiences hiring lawyers. Among other things, Avvo asserts that Over the past two years, 25 million Americans were faced with a situation in which they considered hiring an attorney, [...]
Mark Bennett | June 5, 2007
A few recent blog posts about pro bono representation . . . • Carolyn Elefant’s (Legal Blog Watch) recent post on Arbor Hill v. Albany, in which she comments on (among other things) my post about that case: The problem here was that Gibson Dunn took the case pro bono, and as such, its fee [...]
Mark Bennett | March 29, 2007
I still see criminal-defense lawyers who used to be prosecutors advertising their time with the DA’s office as though it provides a benefit to their clients. Their argument runs something like this: First, it’s better to have someone defending you who knows what attack to expect. Second, former prosecutors generally have more trial experience. Third, [...]
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